


Same Empty Answers

by alcyonenight



Category: Final Fantasy X, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fight Against Sin, Grief/Mourning, Other, Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:34:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcyonenight/pseuds/alcyonenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave becomes a summoner, and travels to defeat Sin with his guardians: Rose, a black mage; John, who wields a war hammer; and Jade, who fights with forbidden machina. Along the way they collect twelve aeons and shed light on a few of Spira's secrets. </p><p>While this is a crossover with Final Fantasy X, no knowledge of the game's world is necessary. FFX fans who do not like Homestuck won't like this either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please forgive me when I get a piece of FFX lore wrong. It's really hard to look up a particular fact somewhere in the midst of a 40 hour game, and the wiki doesn't include everything.

Dave had thought that the dancing, at least, would come easy. His brother had always told him that fighting and dancing were based on the same principles.

Actually, that was the problem. They were too similar.

It felt wrong to let his movements be so smooth, to glide into the motions rather than making an effort to conceal what his body was about to do. He knew he had it wrong before the priest stopped him for the fifth time in as many minutes, and hissed with frustration.

The scarred old man stared at him, evaluating. Dave wondered briefly if he was about to be told that he didn’t have what it took, that something was wrong, that--

“Move from the center,” the priest told him.

Dave’s chest ached. Bro had always told him to do that when he was just a kid, eight-nine-ten years old and too excited about holding a sword in his hands to give a fuck about what he was supposed to do with it.

Fuck, he didn’t want to think about that.

Dave moved into the opening stance for sending again. He took a slow breath, trying to push thoughts of his brother aside, and let the rhythm of the Hymn pulse through him. He lifted the stupid wooden rod and fuck, his eyes were tearing up, his vision was too goddamn blurred to see what he was doing, but he just went with it. The priest was just going to stop him anyway.

Except suddenly, he had moved through all of the parts that he knew, and his arm slowed to a halt, his feet drifted to the floor. He blinked, trying to clear the wetness from his eyes. He thought he saw a streak of color dance across his vision, but it could have just been the water.

“Very good,” the priest said. “Very good. Again.”

##

Dave was so shocked that he forgot he was supposed to be polite to the head priest. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“You are what we have,” the old man told him. “There are no other summoners here. You know the ritual. This is exactly what you have been training for. I believe you are prepared.”

“I’m not a summoner,” Dave insisted. He wiped his palms against his jeans. “I’ve only been studying for three months, there is no fucking way.”

The head priest shook his head. “There is a little girl, five years old. Her brother fell from a cliff and died yesterday. She has no family left. Her grandparents died long ago and her parents died when Sin attacked this island. The last thing that this little girl deserves is for her brother to become a fiend.”

The manipulation was right there on the table. The man wasn’t trying to hide it at all. “You brought in a summoner from another island after the attack. Why can’t you just call someone else?”

“It’s time,” the priest said. “You are ready. And this will be... easy for you, in a sense.”

“What are you even saying?”

The priest sighed. “A summoner must know loss. You know what has been lost here well enough.”

Dave knew the man was pulling his strings, knew it damn well, and let him do it. “Then fine. Fine. I’ll try. But if I can’t do it--”

“You can,” the priest told him. “Our set of summoner’s robes is in the storage room. Be ready in three hours.” He turned and walked down the hall without waiting for Dave to recover enough to protest.

##

The traditional summoner’s rod felt all wrong in Dave’s hand. Even though he’d been practicing with a very close replica, it still felt too light, slipped too easily in his palm. He just knew he was going to drop the damn thing right in the middle of the sending. He already felt awkward enough with a thick cape weighing on his shoulders and the strange ceremonial belt that hung awkwardly over his hips. But somehow, he could put the clothes out of his mind, but not the slick grip of the summoner’s rod.

A quiet knock lifted him from his reverie. He carefully set the rod down on his bed, then yanked his door open. “Yes?”

The head priest looked back at him with something akin to amusement. Dave allowed himself to think, for a precious three seconds, that it was because he was about to announce that this was all some kind of prank.

“I do not think the standard rod fits well with you,” the head priest said. “I have prepared an alternative. I think this is more suitable for you.” He lifted something long and thin and placed it very, very gently into Dave’s outstretched hands. “When you have decided which tool you would rather use, take it with you to the pier. We are ready for you.”

Dave glanced down at exactly what he was holding and swore. He would know that hilt anywhere. It was his brother’s sword, the blade wrapped loosely in cloth so it wouldn’t cut someone’s hands. Somehow it had survived the attack completely intact, and someone had found it, and someone had known it had belonged to his brother... And the timing of this delivery was absolutely not a coincidence.

But shit, it was exactly what he needed.

Dave ripped the cloth away and gave himself exactly ten seconds to stare at the blade.

Time to go.

Dave stepped out of the room and closed the door behind him. The hallway was silent. The Yevonites had probably all left for the sending already, and it wasn’t like anyone would come here to worship while something like that was going on. Still, he took a moment to lock the door of the acolyte’s room the priests had given him when his brother... well, when Sin attacked. This was so no one messed with his stuff, not so that he could put off going out there.

The beach was only a minute’s walk away. As the priest had told him, everything was ready. It seemed as if the entire population of the village had come out for this single boy’s death. As he approached, a few people turned to look at him.

Bro would never let him live it down if he threw up, so Dave wasn’t going to. He schooled his features into what he hoped was a decent mask. The faces around him blurred into something meaningless--except the little girl, who sat near the body hugging her legs to her chest.

It was true. Dave knew exactly what it meant to lose an older brother, lose the last person you had left, and have no one left to help you.

Not lose. He couldn’t hide from that, not here. This was sacred. Bro was dead. This girl’s brother was dead.

Dave slowed, but he didn’t stop. He was what that girl had. He walked down the pier, past a wall of murmurs and whispers. As he neared the edge of the water, he closed his eyes and kept pace. Three... two... one...

His bare foot hit water instead of sand. His ankle stayed dry.

Dave counted out ten paces. Somewhere behind him, the body wrapped in cloth and flowers slid into the water. He stood still, breath caught in his throat.

_Ieyui..._

And he began to dance.

Dave’s body moved almost without his intervention. The sword swept through the salt air, his cape cut through the breeze. The drums pounded out his heartbeat. The blade crashed into his left hand--the dance had never been meant for a sharp object--and the pain sat quietly at the edge of his senses as if knowing how inconsequential it was. The whole expanse of time, everything that had ever been and was and would be, dripped out of his palm like blood.

_He is too young to provide for her. He is only seventeen and knows no trade; he is barely able to provide for himself. He knows that he is paid more than he should be as a form of charity. He hates it, but he doesn’t want his sister to go hungry. So instead of protesting, he works harder, hoping to be worthy of the money._

_He is chopping down a tree. A particularly enthusiastic strike and a loose grip sends his axe flying. He runs after it. It has fallen on a small ledge on the very tip of the cliff. He steps onto it, but it cannot hold his weight, and he plummets into the ocean._

_The water does not break his fall; from so high it is just as hard as stone._

_He is unable to move below the neck, unable to shout, and he drowns. It takes so, so long._

Dave finished the last turn, inverted the sword, and watched pyreflies drift into the sky. The music had gone quiet. Everything was quiet.

He was sinking.

Dave fought his way back to the pier. His clothes had been heavy before, but now they had soaked up a lot of water. The cape tried to pull him back every time a wave pulled away from shore. And now that he was coming down from some kind of bizarre spiritual high, the salt water against his bleeding hand really burned.

The first faces that he met as he crawled out of the water were Rose and John. Oh, shit, he hadn’t told them. And Rose looked just as shocked as John, for once.

“Dave, when did you become a summoner? How did you do that? That is _so cool_ Dave, like actually cool not like making fun of you cool--”

“I must admit that I would also like to know the story behind this event--”

Dave glanced up at them. “Maybe later.” He showed them his bleeding palm. “Got shit to do first.”

“ _Dave--”_

He shook his head. Gotta preserve the mystery as long as you can. The mystique makes you awesome. Also, his hand really hurt and he really, really wanted to change clothes.

Dave let his mouth twitch up in a way that he knew would infuriate Rose for hours and pushed past his friends.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Dave didn’t go to his friends the day of the sending, even after he had bandaged his hand, rinsed off the salt water, and changed into something more comfortable. One of the acolytes brought him something to eat and a cup of water, and he ate without tasting it or even knowing what he was eating. After that he went to sleep.

Maybe he was lucky that he didn’t dream that night.

When he got out of bed the next day, it was almost noon. Dave pulled himself out of bed and stared out the window. Everything felt different. Even the air he breathed was heavy in his lungs, and it felt like everything he looked at was the wrong color. He had to get out of here.

Leaving the temple didn’t help. His sandals felt stiff and unyielding, as if they were new rather than hand-me-downs that had seen years of service _before_ Dave got them. His clothes seemed almost as if they’d been starched flat.

Dave had never felt so alive and he had never felt so lost.

“Dave?”

It took a moment, but he realized that someone was talking to him, and that someone was Rose. He supposed that if it was Rose, he ought to pay attention, and looked over at her. “Yeah,” he offered, the best he could do.

“Are you... all right?” Rose glanced at him, studied his face. “Has something happened?”

“Other than the part where I danced on top of a baby hurricane until fairies flew out of a corpse?”

“Point taken.” There were a few moments of mostly-comfortable silence. Then Rose said, deliberate in every syllable, “Does this mean you are going on a pilgrimage?”

Dave swallowed. “Yeah.”

Rose nodded. He watched her take a deep breath. “I want to go with you. As your guardian. If that’s not too presumptuous of me.”

“You’ll probably die if you don’t chicken out.”

“You _will_ die if you go through with this,” Rose said. “Do you even realize that?”

Dave made himself smile. It felt all wrong on his face. “Not if I win for real.” He looked down at his feet. A haze of light hovered over the sand. “Nothing to lose.”

“You really believe that,” Rose murmured, sounding a little sad.

Dave watched her study him the way she studied tomes of black magic or her mother’s alcoholic concoctions.

“I’m coming with you.”

Dave shook his head. “You’ve got your mom, and someone’s got to keep John from doing anything too stupid.”

“Someone’s got to keep _you_ from doing anything too stupid,” Rose said.

“As if you don’t think this whole thing is stupid,” Dave countered. “It’s not like you don’t rant every day about how fucked up summoners and their guardians have to be to go on these suicide camping trips when it never even--”

“I didn’t say I was going to stop you from going, as you would know if you paid attention to me for ten seconds, I said I was going to go _with_ you. I want to help you. And yes,” Rose added, before he could interrupt, “I know exactly what that means. As you have mentioned, I have extensively considered the potential outcomes of the situation.”

Dave felt the weight of every second of silence. “Okay,” he said. “But it might not even happen, I haven’t actually summoned an aeon or anything.”

“You will,” Rose murmured, and her eyes went dark. “I don’t think you should worry about that.” And then she was the one who turned and left before Dave could get a word in.

##

The wrongness and glaring light had faded a little by the time John showed up. Dave had got his head around things enough to expect him.

“Dave are you a real summoner? Can I go with you and kill fiends and stuff? I could be your guardian, I’m actually getting really good at fighting with a hammer, I want to see you summon stuff--”

Dave sighed. John _would_ be like this. He’d been raised on stories like this. He was descended from Yunalesca, of all people. “I guess you haven’t thought about the part where we probably die?”

“There’s no way we will!” John said. “We’ll defeat Sin once and for all, because it’s us! You’ll be the last High Summoner, and the first one that lives...”

John kept talking, but Dave stopped listening. He knew John was this naive, but there was a difference between knowing and actually seeing it in action.

But still... if he was going to let Rose follow him into a deathtrap, he couldn’t turn down the one friend of his who actually thought this was a good idea.

“Shut up. Fine, you can come. If your dad says it’s okay.”

“Yessss! I’m going to go talk to him right now so _don’t leave_ okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Dave told him, and watched his friend run off before walking back into the temple.

Maybe John’s dad would talk him out of it, and if not, John would probably realize how shitty the whole thing was after a few days and turn around and go home. He could hope so, anyway.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Terezi's physical attributes owe much to Valefor, and a few lines about fayth and aeons are paraphrased from a line from Auron within Final Fantasy X.

Chapter Three

It took less than a week for Dave to decide. He wasn’t going to wait for the head priest to spring it on him, like asking him to teach some of the surviving villagers (a bunch of old people and eight-year-olds!) to fight with swords or suggesting he could be a summoner or that fucking surprise party for his last birthday. There was nothing left for him on this little island except a fayth that might, maybe, decide to grant him a little bit of power. He would go down deep into the temple, dance until she showed up, and either come out with an aeon or just ask the fayth to kill him on the spot.

Easy.

So instead of going to lunch that afternoon, he grabbed his sword (his brother’s sword, he reminded himself) and... just walked down the steps into the Cloister of Trials. He had no idea if anyone had seen him and he tried very hard not to care.

There was some kind of stupid puzzle with carrying spheres around, only carrying one at a time, until placed in the correct locations. Even stranger, it looked like it was powered by machina--machina, in the basement of a temple. He wasn’t going to bother with it at first, ritual be damned, but then Dave realized there was no way around it. A set of scales sat next to a drawbridge and a deep moat, which led to what was obviously the Chamber of the Fayth. He could probably jump the distance. Well, maybe. But he didn’t want to have to do it after going in there. He’d seen a summoner come out of the Cloister before, and it hadn’t been pretty.

So he wandered through the Cloister of Trials with spheres in his hands feeling like an idiot for twenty minutes, until he had a sphere labeled as the Justice Sphere cupped in his hands. Well, it was obvious enough where that went.

When Dave set the sphere on the scale, it sat there without moving for long enough that he wondered if the thing was broken before it tipped slowly to balance. As it did, metal bars holding the other end of the drawbridge lowered into place.

There was nothing else left to do but enter the Chamber. There was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Every second he wasted was that tiny bit of energy he might need inside.

“Three... two... one.”

Dave walked across the drawbridge, yanked open the door, and walked inside. Stone scraped against stone as the door closed behind his back.

“You here?” he asked. “Anyone home?” He waited a few moments for an answer, but was not surprised when nothing happened. Like it would be that easy.

He got to his knees and bowed in prayer, but his eyes were open, taking in the details of the room. There was the usual smattering of religious art in paint and stone, symbols of Yevon and places where pilgrims traveled. But in the center of the room, under glass that time had worn opaque in places and translucent in others, was some kind of sculpture. A bright yellow dragon, sleeping, its wing draped over it. Very detailed for something so few people would ever see.

Dave took a moment to really understand what he was seeing. One of the ribs-or-whatever of the wing of the dragon was more sand than yellow. It was a human arm, hand reaching up as if it were trying to touch him through the glass. A shoulder sank into a streak of orange. What he had thought was a strange patch of shadow in the background was hair.

He had thought he understood. It was a basic part of the job description. _The fayth are human souls bound in stone by ancient Yevon rites. They join with a summoner, and together, they receive the aeon._ But this wasn’t a soul, it was a perfectly-preserved corpse with a dragon built around it.

He bowed again, his arms finding the familiar shape. Fuck. People did this for Yevon? He wasn’t sure he even believed in the guy. Were they awake for it? Did they know this was going to happen? Did the priests even know this was here, that this was what happened, or had the head priest decided that he wasn’t going to tell that part to him or--

Dave shook his head. No. He could waste time worrying about that later. Or maybe he could ask the fayth when it showed up. If it showed up. He needed to concentrate.

He bowed one more time, slow, easy, and got to his feet. The dance would help.

The dance for a summoning was easier than the sending dance. Where a sending was all pirouettes and spinning, a summoning was something slow and swaying, forward and back. It felt a little like trying to coax a shy kid to come out of a hiding place, which in a way it kind of was, except Dave desperately hoped that this wasn’t a child on top of everything else. He held his sword at both ends, let it rest against the back of his neck a few steps, forward and back, tap the hilt against the floor, drop to kneel, beckon, get up again, calling, calling

knees raw, scraping the stone floor again and again and the fabric doesn’t help at all

drop of sweat or maybe blood slides down against shoulder blades

arms shaking as sword gets heavier and heavier

calling calling where the fuck are you

no really where the fuck are you

i know youre here dont hold out on me

He’s not actually expecting it when it comes: **DAMN COOLKID, IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE ON A TIME LIMIT. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! YOU STAY HERE AS LONG AS I WANT YOU TO AFTER ALL!**

Dave stopped and dropped to the floor and did the nice prayer bow, because that was probably the appropriate thing to do when you heard voices in your head in a place like this, assuming it wasn’t just because you were insane, which after all that dancing he imagined was quite possible.

**NO DON’T DO THAT! LET ME TRY AGAIN. MY NAME IS TEREZI. I’M DEAD. WHO ARE YOU?**

Dave looked up slowly. There was actually someone kind of there: a girl about his age, maybe older or younger, it was hard to tell, but with the same hair, the same skin, as the statue. She wore a bright red--something, on her face, he’d never seen that before, but it covered her eyes and it was actually kind of cool. He wondered if he’d feel anything if he reached out to touch her. He decided not to.

“My name is Dave,” he said. “Dave Strider.” He eased down to sit on his heels.

**WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE A SUMMONER, COOLKID STRIDER?**

Dave moistened his lips. “I want to beat Sin. For real. Forever.”

**YOU PROBABLY WON’T. MOST SUMMONERS DON’T MANAGE IT, YOU KNOW! AND EVEN IF YOU DO YOU’LL DEFINITELY DIE! HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?**

“I don’t care, I just want to do it.”

**DON’T YOU THINK THAT’S A LITTLE DEPRESSING?**

“It killed my brother. I want to kill it. Or at least give it a good serious smackdown. Make it remember.”

**REMEMBER YOU, OR YOUR BROTHER? HAHAHA DON’T ANSWER THAT! I LIKE YOU. YOU HAVE POTENTIAL AND YOUR EYES ARE AWESOME.**

“So does that mean I pass, or whatever?”

**YEAH SURE! HERE! IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE, TAKE THIS!**

Dave had the bizarre sense that Terezi was quoting something and he should know what it was as the fayth--Terezi--shimmered and faded into a pyrefly. It drifted a little, then pressed into Dave’s chest, like someone was shoving at his ribs. (He expected it to hurt and he was a little disappointed that it was painless.) He felt a little nauseous. Nothing else had changed.

“Whelp, time to go, I guess,” he muttered.

Slowly, carefully, Dave got to his feet. No blood on the clothes, at least not in front where he could see it. Good. Sword looked okay. His hand should probably be bandaged again, he thought, but that could wait. He had to get outside and see if he could do this.

Rose’s affirmation that he could, and how upset she had looked about it, flashed through his head for a moment.

Dave pushed the door open and walked out of the Chamber, across the bridge, through the corridors, up the stairs. There were monks chanting, and the hall was still sunlit. It wasn’t even dinnertime, yet.

“Dave!”

He flinched. It hurt. Then he glanced over to see who was shouting at him.

John was there, grinning like a madman. Rose was next to him, with a pleased little smile on her face.

“Did you pull it off? My dad said he heard a monk say you were down there, so I found Rose, and we were just talking about whether we should go after you and--are you okay, you look kind of--”

“You’re not even giving him a chance to answer, John,” Rose replied. “Relax.” She looked up at Dave, studying him quietly. “Do you have something you need to do?”

Dave chuckled. “Yeah, something like that,” he replied. “Come on.”

His instinct was to duck somewhere private, so that no one but John and Rose would know if he couldn’t pull it off--but as weird as she’d been about it, Rose had been so sure. And there was tradition to consider, and now wasn’t really the time to defy it. Instead, he led them wordlessly (because silence was much more impressive) out of the temple toward the beach. Someone spotted him, and there was murmuring, and he knew his friends weren’t going to be the only ones staring him down while he did this.

The fishermen were sailing toward the shore to sell the day’s catch. Some of their families were waiting for them. A few monks were trailing him from a distance. John spluttered questions, which he and Rose both ignored. There were a lot of eyes on him when he came to a halt right at the edge of the water.

“Are you ready?” Rose asked.

“Please. Bitch loves me,” Dave replied with as much bravado as he could muster. “Watch this.”

He held the sword in a tight grip as he raised his arms over his head, then stretched his sword arm back and his other hand forward and _pulled_.

And there she was, becoming more and more solid as she swooped down from the sky: the yellow dragon from the sculpture, though without the human parts sticking out of it. Terezi. She dipped low enough to graze the sea with her belly, probably just to show off. She landed on the beach without kicking up a single grain of sand and sniffed the air. **QUITE A CROWD YOU’VE GOT THERE!** Dave heard-but-didn’t.

She took off, spraying sand all over him, and vanished into the clouds. Everyone cheered as he spat sand out of his mouth.


End file.
